October 19, 2004
Intel, the world's largest silicon chip maker, and Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan's telecom giant, have signed a memorandum of understanding in order to cooperate on the development of a variety of multimedia applications and services for the future that will be digital homes. The chipmaker is also inviting Taiwan's leading
IT hardware makers to design digital home products. This is Intel's first time to establish such a relationship with a telecom company.
In a digital home, personal computers and consumer electronics devices are connected through wires or "wirelessly" in order to provide multimedia options, ranging from gaming to movies to music, in addition to traditional computing functions, throughout the home. Such a home is also designed to allow users to access and transfer digital content between multimedia devices from inside or outside the home.
Paul Otellini, president and chief operating officer of Intel, says that Taiwan, with over 50 percent of its households already hooked up to the Internet with broadband, is in a great position to create digital homes.
Intel and Chunghwa plan to begin offering a jointly developed online karaoke service in Taiwan by the end of the year. Taiwan's home appliance leader Ta Tung will provide support on hardware development for this project.
The two partners also intend to establish an interoperability lab for digital home technologies to test products in Taiwan.
Taiwan's
IT hardware manufacturers will begin releasing their first models of entertainment personal computers (EPC) before the end of the year, and other digital home products are set to hit the market in 2005.
(United Daily News, AFP)
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